THE STRANGEST GOVERNMENT CANADA HAS SEEN IN A LONG TIME
By Jeffrey Simpson

The Globe and Mail (Canada)
November 17, 2006 Friday

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court slaps the Harper government’s
wrist over proposed new methods of vetting judges.

Rona Ambrose, the beleaguered Environment Minister, gets a thumbs-down
internationally for Canada’s poor greenhouse gas emissions record.

The Prime Minister has an off-again, on-again meeting with the head
of the world’s rising power, China, as if there should be any doubt
that China is, well, sort of important.

It’s been quite a week or so. Is there anybody else, or any other
country, the Harper government might like to annoy? These little
episodes offer windows into the strangest government Canada has seen
in a long time.

The government is occasionally capable of striking, but thoughtful,
decisiveness, as when Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, with Prime
Minister Stephen Harper’s obvious backing, killed income trusts.

This decision was exactly right, if a little late. Sure, the government
had to eat crow, having campaigned against any change, but corporate
Canada’s desire to pay as little tax as possible was getting out
of hand. The Liberals knew this while in power, wobbled before the
"senior’s lobby" and caved.

Contrast that Flaherty/Harper decisiveness with just about every other
file where sideways motion, or no motion at all, seems the order of
the day. In Parliament, almost everything is partially or completely
held up by the minority situation.

The government got its budget bills passed, and that’s about it. The
Action Plan on the environment is dead on arrival. The "tough on crime"
bill contains some elements moving swiftly, but the rest is going
nowhere. The overwrought Accountability Act dragged on in the Senate
and has been sent back to the House. The bill limiting Senate terms to
eight years remains in the Senate, where the Liberals are in control.

More significant than the parliamentary delays, which are to be
expected in a minority government, is how little the government
has put before Parliament. For a government that arrived in office
ostensibly bursting with new ideas, the agenda is sparse indeed.

The government had its famous five points. Four were acted upon swiftly
(the Patient Wait Times Guarantee is dying of its own stupidity),
after which it seemed to run out of gas. The famous non-issue, the
"fiscal imbalance," has gone nowhere. The government sent aloft all
sorts of trial balloons about how to handle the non-issue, without
settling on a course of action.

Climate change has been a nightmare. The government was absolutely
right in stating Canada could not meet its Phase One commitments;
it was also entirely correct to blame the Liberals for this this.

Instead of presenting an aggressive Phase Two plan, it emitted the
Action Plan that should have been called a Non-Action Plan. Having
been panned at home and abroad, the plan became an international joke
and a domestic political liability. Officials are madly phoning around
outside the government to see how it can be beefed up.

On research and innovation, a file completely ignored in the party’s
campaign manifesto, the government is casting about for what to do.

On postsecondary education, universities and provinces are scratching
their heads trying to discern Ottawa’s intentions.

On Indian Affairs, the government scrapped the Liberals’ Kelowna
accord, without offering a different strategy. In foreign affairs,
the government is literally at sea, treating China like a miscreant
schoolboy, stupidly slapping Turkey over the 90-year-old Armenian
"genocide" (then kissing and making up), tying Canada’s Middle East
policy to Israel, and spurning a meeting with Europeans lest they
criticize Canada’s climate change record.

A curious inability to move forward, coupled with a prickly
defensiveness but occasional decisiveness, characterizes the
government.

The main reason: a centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s
Office that exceeds anything Ottawa has seen – and that’s saying
something.

This isn’t the friendly dictatorship, but rather a cold one.Everything,
down to letters-to-the-editor, has to be cleared with the PMO.

There’s no delegation to ministers because, with a few exceptions,
the Prime Minister doesn’t trust them. Relations with the press are
awful, a situation entirely of the PMO’s making.

The control-freak mentality over communications and policy produces
a curiously constipated government that picks fights too easily and
has a surprisingly thin agenda.

No wonder this week’s Decima Research poll found the Conservatives
trailing the Liberals, leaderless and often hypocritical as they have
been, in all provinces but Alberta.